Does native advertising even work? (Hint: it depends)

If the definition of native advertising is enough to get even the most level headed among us scratching their heads, the issues it leaves in its wake are even more complicated. Today, we’re picking apart one such problem.

“What”, asks Jeff Jarvis, “is the efficacy of replacing five-word banners with 500 word stories?”

Well, then. There’s a question, Jeff.

It’s not that we’ve set out here to be pedantic, it’s that just as the term ‘native advertising’ itself seems to be a confusing one, so too do the questions arising from it seem overly simplified.

The first issue — as implied by Jarvis’s opener — is, simply this:

Is native advertising effective?

A recent article by Greg Sterling, published in MarketingLand would argue that yes it is. There are a lot of figures in this report: it’s a good overview of the data currently available. Mobile native advertising reportedly performs 10 times better than mobile display advertising at similar frequencies; users gave native advertising something like three times more attention than they did a more conventional ad; 40% more time was spent interacting with native advertising than with the ‘standard’ and, lastly, brand recall was more than two times better with native advertisements.

This all sounds rather compelling, and, of course, it might well be, but what does ‘success’ look like? The MMA report doesn’t reveal this. Are they talking about cold, hard conversion-to-sales rates? Time spent on site? Clicks? Click throughs? Does time spent on the site actually mean active time, or could it also be counted if you load the page, then nip off to make a cup of coffee? Isn’t increased brand awareness — which is hard to measure — also a mark of success?

The point is, it’s easy to be lured in by these statistics, which may well be fully transparent — we’re by no means casting aspersions here — but it’s high time we started asking for specifics.

What are the downsides?

Well, here’s where it gets interesting. There seems to be something of a dichotomy between these ads’ effectiveness and the consumer’s attitude towards them, particularly when you bring the idea of ‘trust’ into the equation.

Let’s go back to Sterling’s piece again, just for a moment. He quotes a Civic Science poll from 2015 which reported that 61% of respondents felt that native advertising undermined the trust of the publication it came from. Contently’s 2014 poll concluded that 54% of users don’t trust sponsored content (57% said they’d prefer banner ads over the other options). As an aside to this, Sterling raises the point that attitudes to native advertising differ according to the age of the respondent: the younger the generation were, he said, the more open to the idea of native advertising they might be than, for example, their parents.

If there is a difference in attitudes over the generations, could the percentage split of opinion we see in the chart above be explained away mostly by a set of age brackets? 542 internet users between the ages of 18 and 65 were surveyed. If we crudely applied the generational split to these results, isn’t it entirely possible that this chart shows nothing more than differing opinions between young and old on the subject of native advertising as a whole, rather than as a trend in and of itself?

Native advertising might be a “false messiah”, but it really hinges on what problem you were hoping it would solve

We’re only getting picky here to drive home a rather rudimentary point: specificity is king. It’s important. Damned important. Sure, native advertising might be, as Jeff Jarvis suggests, a “false messiah”, but it really hinges on what problem you were hoping it would solve: diminishing ad revenue? Falling sales? A beleaguered journalism industry?

How should we respond to data?

Doug Kessler has also spoken recently about the perils of data, and here at Content Insights, our interest was understandably peaked: “Data is not insight until its meaning is unpacked for an audience,” he said. “Insight is the most powerful but least used force in content marketing. It’s… that flash of gold we sometimes see as we pan for meaning.” And even though he’s talking about content marketing there, we have to say: nicely put, Doug.

“Brands that use native advertising agencies need to get a lot better at holding them to account”, explained Jon Wilks on these pages last week

Transparency should lie with the content itself: that is, making the reader aware that what they’re reading is in fact sponsored content, and not part of the rest of the editorial work — as Yolanda Wang said in her article — but the practice of transparency needs to also extend also to the way agencies report on these native advertising campaigns to their brands.

In what seems to have been a very timely example only a few days before we spoke, Jon Wilks had posted a video which quite quickly received around 700 views. Not bad, he thought. Then, he looked more closely at the data. 80% of those viewings had occurred with no sound — odd, given that it was a music related piece — and many more only stuck around for the first 11 seconds. Only 2% were what he’d class as ‘genuine’ views. With the insight that comes with working in this industry, he knew the questions to ask, but for those others who outsource their native advertising to agencies, those kind of enquiries are not often made naturally. It would have been easy to take that encouraging number at face value, when a more detailed analysis would reveal something considerably less grandiose.

For too long, analysis of online content — in whatever form it takes — has been something that has been almost clandestine. It’s high time we changed that: just as consumers need to know when a piece of content is ‘sponsored’, surely, too. do brands need a better understanding of exactly how their native advertising is performing, beyond the standard — and superficial — world of impressions and views.